Parisians will have heard their share of Franglais - a mix of French and English - this summer as the French capital played host to people from around the world during the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
And even organisers leaned into the linguistic mélange by producing posters featuring a range of Franglais puns.
“Eau là là,” read a poster spotted by one of our team at the Paralympic Games advertising the fact that free drinking water (‘eau’) was available.
tripsetsaveurs/TikTok
The poster includes two of the Olympic mascots, the Phryges, next to a drinking fountain.
Another, encouraging people to put their rubbish in the bin (‘benne’) read “No benne, no gain!”
And one poster, highlighting the fact that Paris was powering the Games venues with renewable energy included the line “Watt a good idea” with an explanatory sentence in French that a watt is a unit of energy.
Credit: tripsetsaveurs/TikTok
Olympic organisers are far from the first to use Franglais to get their point across. In 2021, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson urged President Macron to “prenez un grip” and “donnez-moi un break”. Mr Johnson, in his biography of Winston Churchill, praised the World War Two leader for “some of the greatest franglais of all time”.
Churchill is said to have warned French President Charles de Gaulle: “Si vous me double-crosserez, je vous liquiderai.” (Roughly, “If you double-cross me, I will liquidate you.”)
And de Gaulle claimed he had learned English so he could understand Churchill's French.
